Imagine that Joe McConjurer (A conjuration wizard) finds this:
Its a wooden "comb" of some sort, a really weird one. One of the comb's furthest tips is colored red (as shown). The comb has different "teeth" of it at different heights , as per the image. One "tooth" can be 10cm tall or 4cm tall or 8cm tall or whatever.
Joe Minor Conjures a copy of it.
Question A: Are the different irregular tooth heights at the same height (or at least very similar) when minor conjured?
Now, later on, Joe finds a paper on the ground, with the following writing on it:
"Comb Language. Measure the teeth, starting from the red tip to the other side
1 cm = A
2 cm = B
3 cm = C
4 cm = D
...
etc"
Joe then gets a ruler and measures the comb's teeth, getting the following values:
8 cm, 5 cm, 12 cm, 12 cm, 15 cm
Which translate to "hello"
Enough combs can translate to an entire book, each comb can be a "page". Therefore if your answer to question A was "Yes", then you must agree to that you can minor conjure books.
Counterargument 1: But wait, you can't conjure bad combs with so much precision, there has to be an error of at least X cm
Then I just design the comb alphabet to have the separation between letters to be longer than X
Counterargument 2: But wait, you can only conjure what you've mentally recorded into your memory, you obviously can't remember all the height details of the bad comb's teeth
Then I can't minor conjure keys either, because keys have teeth that need to be of an exact height too. But more severely, if Minor Conjuration is memory dependant, couldn't I just Charm myself into believing that I've seen some kind of imaginary type of natural mineral that kills everything it touches? Then conjure that? Or Charm myself into seeing X, then conjure it, allowing me to conjure anything from my imagination?
Conclusion: You should be able to Minor Conjure books.
I'll call this Hyphen's Bad Comb Argument. But I'm open to discussion. Kgo.
god damn you have to much time on your hands...
P.S: NERD!
P.P.S: JK :D
Minor Illusion. You create an image of any kind of comb you want.
Minor Conjuration: Now that you've seen it, you can make a copy of it.
Alternatively, replace Minor Illusion (in the above) with one of the Divination thingies.
Basically, this argument is logically equivalent to the following:
- Prestidigitation allows the caster to create 'a small campfire'.
- I use a wish to become as large as a kaiju (giant monster).
- To me, a city block is now 'small'.
- Ergo, I can now use prestidigitation to conjure city-block sized fires that deal massive damage to anything caught in them.
In other words, a pretty classic fallacy of scale.
--
Pauper
Except a small campfire is small for a campfire, not small compared to your size.
You've obviously never seen kaiju campfires.
Hyphen_ wrote:
Well he can't minor conjure a spell book because that is technically a magical object.
If he is conjuring up a book he read at some point the text might trail off into blah blah blah when he wasn't paying attention while reading. And pages he hadn't got to or skipped would be blank.
Secondly conjuring copies of books is IP infringement and those who do so will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. By executioner's axe.
This isn't reasoned out to a level that would satisfy a sophist, but I'd probably let it fly once to encourage creative use of such spells, but not again. Sometimes you can do something on the first try that you never repeat.
DontEatRawHagis wrote:
The keen mind feat seems helpful for this for the purpose of non-information objects (remembering the precice shape of a key to conjure). It makes conjuring books a bit pointless though since you will already remember all of it that you have seen w/i the last month.
Jay_Ibero_911 wrote:
At the risk of totally derailing the thread into a discussion of Platonic versus Aristotelian metaphysics, I'll point out that summoning a full waterskin or a key is a fairly basic use of the spell.
The real question is, can you use Minor Conjuration to summon something with an 'emergent' property -- that is, a property that isn't defined by its form? You can summon a key, but is it the key that opens the lock on your cell door? If you don't know what the key that opens the lock on your cell door looks like, how would you know how to include that property? Summoning a book -- a bunch of pieces of paper bound together -- is trivial. What's written in the book is the important stuff, though, and if you have no idea what it is, how would you know how to conjure it?
Yes, 'magic', but this is cantrip-level magic. I'd make allowances for caster level (a high level caster should be able to conjure more complex objects than a low level caster), but Minor Conjuration should never be able to conjure something that you'd legitimately need to use wish to get.
--
Pauper
The real argument here is actually a lot more behind the scenes, and solely in DM territory. And that's "How much of the conjuration is the wizard specifying details and how much is it magic just 'grabbing' a copy of the specified object?"
If it's fully the latter, I need only have seen the object. In the case of a book it'd be the wizard (mentally, by recalling it) going "this object here" and magic recreating it.
If it's fully the former then it's not so much 'copying an object' as it is 'mentally creating an object'. (Which'd beg the question why do you need to have seen the object in the first place.)
Pauper wrote:
Whoops, wrong thread on this topic
I can't find any reference to minor conjure, but regardless, there's a problem with encoding items as pages, which is that anything that could be made to convey the same as a spellbook's page would probably be very large with even very small "error of resolution" problems. Consider that wizards have to convey information so densely that they have all created a specific notation that only they know for their spellbooks (which is why you have to spend extra time copying someone else's spells into your book, because half the time is spent deciphering their particular shorthand). This only makes sense if the economy of space is so important that each caster has to essentially create their own "compression algorithm", so to speak, to fit everything on the page. That's not even to mention that there are probably requirements for diagrams and the like that are very difficult to encode textually (certainly not with the dead-simple algorithm mentioned by the OP).
Let's take a real-life example of something that is probably less complicated than casting a magic spell: linguistics. The International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet) has 107 glyphs, 31 modifying diacritics, and 19 additional signs for suprasegmental features, to be able to decribe the sounds that can be uttered in human speech with some accuracy. Even if you could get your resolution errors down to a millimeter (good luck reading that in any reasonable amount of time--hell, good luck even finding an accurate ruler to allow reading it to be possible), that's still a little over fifteen centimeters of "width" (that is, tooth length) per comb tooth per letter, about half a foot. If we can assume comb "length" (that is, tooth width plus space around it) is bound by the same resolution constraints, then each letter takes up three millimeters (minus a millimeter at the end of the comb, not that it matters). If we assume a page can contain about 3000 "words", then your combs are up to three meters long and half a foot wide each. Good luck fitting that spellbook into your adventuring pack, not to mention keeping its 1mm wide teeth from breaking whenever you sneeze. And this is without even bothering about the diagram issue above, which further increases information density and complicates your encoding algorithm (or at least makes the teeth longer).
The point is, like mentioned earlier, there is an information density problem that matters, here, and which you've already conceded constraints to. I think it's easy to say that any book with more than a completely trivial amount of content (think, "See, Spot, Run"-level) is out of reach of this spell, without even getting into stuff like "is this a template item or a copy".
... Or if you just want to keep it secret. You know, like what most cyphers are used for.